The BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen, reporting on the aftermath of Alan Johnston’s release (in which he placed Hamas’s stated, documented and constantly reiterated genocidal intentions in metaphorical quote marks by saying merely that this was what ‘Israel believes’), gushed thus:

To get the mood in Gaza, I rang the BBC’s excellent Fayed Abu Shamala, our senior journalist there. No-one worked harder to get Alan Johnston out. He gave a vivid account of the last few days in Gaza, which I think is worth quoting at length. … Israel may not like it, but there are signs that some people in influential positions in the West are changing their view of Hamas after everything it did to release Alan Johnston.

According to Tom Gross in 2004, however, ‘the BBC’s excellent’ Fayed abu Shamala is actually rather close to Hamas:

Some of the foreign BBC staff are quite open about their sympathies for Hamas. The senior BBC Arabic Service correspondent in the Gaza Strip, Fayad Abu Shamala, told a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001, (attended by the then Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin) that journalists and media organizations in Gaza, including the BBC, are ‘waging the campaign [of resistance/terror against Israel] shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people.’ The best the BBC could do in response to requests from Israel that they distance themselves from these remarks at the time, was to issue a statement saying, ‘Fayad’s remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC.’ Indeed, today, three years later, the BBC is continuing to use Abu Shamala as much as ever. He was, for example, one of the BBC reporters in Gaza last month, who contributed to the BBC’s highly slanted reporting (on both the BBC English and Arabic services) of Israel’s operation to root out Hamas bomb-makers in Rafah in the southern Gaza.

Abu Shamala was by Johnston’s side when he came out of Gaza. Shouldn’t the BBC acknowledge that their ‘excellent’ senior Arabic service correspondent in Gaza who reports on Hamas is a close associate of Hamas? Indeed, shouldn’t the BBC’s senior Arabic correspondent in Gaza have no such affiliation at all? Or to put it another way, why should the British TV licence-fee payer subsidise a Hamas supporter broadcasting propaganda about Hamas under the guise of objectivity and detachment?

Hello, BBC trustees? Anyone still actually alive in there?